NEC Launches Gate Array Site

Electronic News, July 9, 2001 by Gale Morrison

Japanese IC giant tries hand at Web support with design center

While several EDA companies sit licking their Web-based design and collaboration wounds, one of the world's largest semiconductor companies is set this week to leap into the space.

NEC Electronics Inc., the Santa Clara, Calif., IC arm of Tokyo's NEC Corp. (nasdaq: NIPHNY) is today launching the NEC Gate Array Design Center, a site on the Internet devoted to supporting its gate array customers.

Gate arrays are not the fashionable semiconductor place to be. Because gate arrays are a standard "sea of gates" device where customization is only accomplished at the final metallization step, their clock frequencies don't get above 100MHz and design sizes don't exceed 1.5 million gates.

But Bart Ladd, assistant general manager of the System LSI business unit of NEC, said for customers that need greater density than they are getting with FPGAs and a lower cost than is required for ASIC photomasks and other non-recurring engineering, gate arrays are the way to go.

"There is a position for gate array that is between the FPGA and the cell-based ASIC," Ladd said. "FPGAs are offering the programmability, and cell-based designs are going into the 300MHz, 10-million gates area ... There's a big slice of the market there in-between where I can offer a gate array solution that is four to eight times less cost and four to eight times less board space. That's a very strong value proposition."

Since NEC is approaching the operation as a customer support improvement and not a new revenue stream as EDA companies Synopsys, SOCworks.com, Cadence Design Systems and others have done, NEC could very well have an easier time of it. And rather than having to convince customers to put the engineering of their most complex semiconductor intellectual property where hackers might get it, NEC's approach is to offer Web design to the mature and stable gate array market.

"People have tried to use the Web to marry third-party intellectual property together, to be a COT (customer-owned tooling) house," Ladd said. "NEC believes we will be more successful because we aren't trying to marry different people together and cobble together a flow ... This is the NEC flow; we own all of the technology and we are the leader in gate arrays."

Ladd explained how NEC decided to structure its Web approach (see www.necgatearray.com).

"The customer comes to a public Web site, gets information on packaging, macros, NEC policies and a calculator so they can go in and input their user-defined logic," Ladd said. "He gets back at the site a die-size estimate, price estimate, engineering sample turnaround time estimate, mass production turnaround time estimate ... all on the public Web site.

"If it's a customer we can take on, they get a password and are transferred over to an extranet where we can have more of an individual relationship with the customer for tech support, the engineering back-end, the salespeople, etc.," he said. "They download our OpenCAD tools via ftp server and get started. We see them through the front-end and they ftp their files to (NEC engineering partner) GDA Technologies, which does back-end design and ftps back their timing files for verification.

"We send the files off to the manufacturing facility, where the customer can watch their product go through the fab and then they are linked to the FedEx site where they can watch it on its way back to them," he said. "Once they approve their engineering sample, the relationship is handled by our reps and our partner Future Electronics, and it becomes again the standard customer relationship."

Ladd said one of the biggest benefits for NEC is that it can handle more gate-array customers that have smaller orders. "This is allowing gate arrays to get to much smaller projects," he said.

Ladd said that the current industry downturn, and especially the squeeze that networking equipment companies are under, is an opportunity for NEC, which owns 22 percent of the world gate array market, according to Gartner Dataquest, San Jose.

"As an example of what we would like to pursue," Ladd said, "The networking system houses today utilize a lot of FPGAs, but these same companies are being challenged from a profitability standpoint as they never have before. I can replace four of their FPGAs with one gate array and still offer them a substantially cheaper solution."

Ladd also said that NEC plans to expand this delivery model.

"This is NEC's first foray into a Web-based environment, and if we are successful, and we plan to be, we will expand that to cell-based ICs and to microcontrollers.